4-1 Skills: Summarizing and Synthesizing

Summarizing and synthesizing information are comprehensive skills which take into account the entire body of a text. Summarizing a piece of information demonstrates your understanding of the topic, as well as your ability to hone in on the key points. Synthesizing information, often via inference or the transcription of relevant information into a different form, demonstrates your ability to utilize the information which you have summarized. The following points are skills by which your ability to summarize and synthesize academic English may be tested.

In university, you will often be required to read a long passage of text and identify the main idea(s). Summarizing this information consists of two components: 1) identifying the key points of the issue; and 2) distilling a large amount of information into something much shorter. Always write summaries in your own words; paraphrase rather than copy sentences or phrases from the original text. You may be asked to summarize various lengths of text, from a paragraph to a multiple-page article.

Your ability to take this large amount of information and condense it into a concise summary demonstrates to your instructor your understanding of the key points of the topic. Likewise, the CAEL Assessment includes questions highlighting the main ideas of a given topic, and so your ability to summarize information will help you succeed here.